Cynthia Ellen Elbaum grew up in Ashfield, Massachusetts and attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston before graduating from Smith College in 1989, where she pursued her interest in photography and also studied Russian. She taught English while studying on a scholarship in Moscow, and then moved to New York where she taught English to Russian refugees. Elbaum began her career as a photojournalist in 1992, after she witnessed dead bodies on a Moscow street following Boris Yeltsin's takeover of the Russian parliament. On December 1, 1994, she went to Chechnya to cover the gathering of Russian forces there; she was killed three weeks later by a Russian bomb.